The Opposition is engaged in self-sabotage

Feb 15, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- You know, I never thought I’d see the day when elections in Guyana would become something like a tragicomedy. But here we are, a nation where elections have taken on the gravitas of a Greek tragedy, except instead of the gods meddling in mortal affairs, we have political parties who refuse to accept any result that doesn’t end with them in power. It’s like watching a gambler who only considers the casino fair when he’s winning, and cries foul the moment the dice roll against him.

The Opposition have found themselves in a peculiar predicament. On one hand, they insist that elections are fraught with fraud because of a bloated voters’ list. But on the other hand, demographic arithmetic suggests that they actually have a shot at winning—if they, you know, didn’t make such an art form out of self-sabotage. But let’s be clear: the only election they would ever consider legitimate is the one that crowns them the victors.

This is the curse of these political parties. It’s a sort of tragic, existential dilemma. They have become so trapped in their own narrative of victimhood that they are now incapable of adaptability. Imagine, for a moment, that the Opposition did, in fact, win an election. Would they then declare the system fair? Or would they suddenly develop a newfound suspicion of the very mechanisms that brought them to power? It’s like the man who rails against capitalism, then wins the lottery and suddenly discovers a deep and abiding love for the free market.

The latest obsession is biometrics. This is presented as the grand solution! The panacea! The key to unlocking the doors of electoral credibility! Never mind that no amount of fingerprint scanning, iris recognition, or DNA testing will fix what is, at its core, a problem of their making. Because let’s be honest: even if the elections were held in heaven, with the ballots counted by angels using abacuses made of celestial light, the Opposition would still cry foul. They would say. “The angels were biased.”

But let’s entertain the premise for a second. Suppose the government, to prove just how fair they can be, implemented the most sophisticated biometric voting system known to man. Every voter, before casting their ballot, would have to undergo facial recognition, voice analysis, and maybe even a retinal scan—just to be sure. What then? Would the Opposition finally accept the results? Or would they find a way to argue that the biometric validations machines were hacked? That some nefarious foreign entity had infiltrated the system? That someone, somewhere, had swapped the biometric database with that of a small village in  Russia?

The irony, of course, is that the country’s demographics have finally shifted in such a way that the Opposition could, theoretically, win. The numbers are there. The electorate is diverse enough. The possibility exists. But instead of capitalizing on this reality, they have chosen instead to cling to a narrative of perpetual victimhood, a story where they are forever the aggrieved party, doomed to contest elections in a system they claim is rigged—until they win, at which point it will miraculously become the gold standard of democracy.

They do not deserve to participate in elections. But despite their tragicomic descent into electoral nihilism, they still have a legal and constitutional right to participate in elections. This is the absurdity of it all. If a man spends his entire life saying that restaurants in his city serve poisoned food, but continues to eat in those very same restaurants, what conclusion should we draw? Either he doesn’t believe his own claims, or he has made peace with the idea of slow, agonizing poisoning. The Opposition, in the grandest display of political irony, argues against the legitimacy of the very process they so desperately want to be a part of.

But of course, they cannot be denied this right. Democracy, as flawed and maligned as it may be, does not work that way. And so, the cycle continues. Every election, the same accusations. The same calls for reform. The same insistence that this time, if only this one condition is met, things will be different. And then, when the results come in—should they not be favorable—the same familiar cries of fraud and injustice will echo through the halls of political discourse, like a badly written sequel to a film no one wanted in the first place.

So, what’s the lesson in all of this? Perhaps it’s that political parties, like gamblers, should know when to leave the table. Or maybe it’s that sometimes, when you spend too much time crying wolf, people stop listening. Or maybe—just maybe—the real tragedy isn’t that the Opposition has been consigned to the trash bin of history, but that they put themselves there, sealed the lid, and are now banging from the inside, demanding to be let out.

(The Opposition is engaged in self-sabotage)

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• DNA testing, existential dilemma, Greek tragedy, peculiar predicament

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